Forming the School of Information

Q. While the names of other professional schools clearly indicate the career field in which their graduates will work, the School of Information's name is somewhat ambiguous. How should we interpret the School's name?

...The consequences of all of that technology driven activity are still very unclear and so part of struggling with answering a question like that is that we are really in a horseless carriage stage in terms of even understanding what we a re talking about...

Q. Would it be more accurate to see the name of the School of Information in terms of an evolution?

...Even the name, School of Information, may not carry over into the future...More and more the activities of the School are to explore the technical, social, legal, economic and behavioral aspects of the whole set of environments that sup port of the creation and dissemination of new knowledge...

Q. What role did the World Wide Web play in the formation of the School of Information?

The Web was not the trigger. The Web was a fortuitous coincidence that made what we were trying to do more visible...

Trends in Higher Education and the Workplace

Q. How did the concept of collaboratories evolve and how is it applicable to trends emerging in the workplace?

...The idea is that you could use this technology to allow teams of people to interact with each other and the tools to do work together, have access to the information they needed to inform that work and also have increased access to facilities...this concept of collaboratories is one that we've been using a lot, but that concept is generalizable to other venues of work.

Q. Who are some of the thinkers who have most influenced you in terms of understanding changes now going on in the workplace?

One thinker that has had a great influence on me is John Seely Brown...he has done some thoughtful thinking about the implications of technology on education, the role of technology in the broader world of work and even more recently the concept of regional advantage...

Q. What are some of the consequences of this new technology in terms of interactions between higher education and the workplace?

A consequence of this new technology is that it gives you this ability to make the formal learning process transcend time and place...and then you also have the virtualization of the workplace itself...

Q. Could you describe the notion of the virtual corporation and some of its implications?

...Usually what people mean by that is in the sense of how motion pictures are made...there's this agile forming and reforming of specific organizational entities with some form of goal in mind...

Q. Is there an analogy that can be drawn between movie production and emerging notions of the virtual corporation?

Q. Are there some key paradoxes that help explain current changes in the workplace?

...There's this theme of paradoxes and this theme of continuum or breaking down boundaries or fuzzing traditional roles and all of these are ways of coming at the destabilizing or opportunity creating, depending on how you look at it, nature of this stuff.

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